26/10/2007

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

David Litchfield on the Rechnitz massacre

Quite a stir was caused this week by an article by British journalist and author David R. L. Litchfield dealing with a massacre of 200 Jews that took place in Rechnitz, on the Austro-Hungarian border, shortly before the end of World War II. In it, Litchfield asserts that the massacre was a form of amusement for the Nazi guests of Margit von Batthyany, daughter of and partial heir to the German Thyssen industrial family. Originally published in The Independent, the article appeared in translation in the FAZ. This translation omitted, however, not only anecdotes about Margit's purported sadistic sexual appetite, but also Litchfield's assertion that Margit too was handed a weapon and invited to take part in the massacre.

The other papers reacted cooly to the story. The massacre has been common knowledge since several of the culprits were tried in Austria in 1946. In 1994, Margaretha Heinrich and Eduard Erne shot "Totschweigen" (Wall of Silence), a film about the massacre. And in 1998, Austrian historian Eva Holpfer once more described the events and the shamefully lenient sentences handed down at the trial (here her essay in German as a pdf file). The newspapers do agree, however, that the Thyssen family still has much work to do in clarifying its involvement with the Nazis.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 26.10.2007

Eduard Erne, whose 1994 film "Totschweigen" (Wall of Silence) deals with the massacre, explains
in an interview with Sandra Kegel the difference between Rechnitz and
other Nazi crimes: "The events that night bore a similarity to the
death march of forced labourers sent in the following days through the
villages towards Mauthausenconcentration camp.
Here the Austrian civilian population had first-hand experience of the
Shoa. These things didn't take place in far-off camps, but right in front of everyone's noses.
They saw what was going on, they were witnesses, every day. Also in
Rechnitz. Because the way to the station led right by where the digging
had taken place, and where the forced labourers had been shot. That's
why it was incomprehensible for us that suddenly after the war no one
wanted to remember where the dead were buried." Erne is also unsure
whether Countess Batthyany participated in the massacre: "There have
been rumours and attempts at blackmail, but there's no evidence."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 25.10.2007

Whether a "Thyssen countess" participated in the Rechnitz massacre may be of interest to the boulevard press, but not to historian and journalist Stefan Klemp, director
of historical research in Germany for the Simon Wiesenthal Center. But
he would very much like to know what has become of the true culprits.
"Files now being examined at the Central Office for the Investigation
of Nazi Crimes in Dortmund have uncovered a grotesque and scandalous acton the part of West German authorities.
After 1945, SS leader Franz Podezin, the presumed culprit behind the
Rechnitz massacre, not only worked as an agent of the Western Allies in
the GDR. West German criminal prosecution authorities also enabled
Podezin to flee Germany. The case shows above all that it's high time
the history of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation were itself investigated."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 20.10.2007

The massacre of 200 Jews in Rechnitz did take place, writes Joachim Güntner. But far less certain is whether Margit von Batthyany, born Margit Thyssen-Bornemisza, had any responsibility in it, he concludes. In Litchfield's book "The Thyssen Art Macabre," published roughly a year ago (reviews here, here, here), "the responsibility of the Batthyany couple for the massacre of the Jews was still dealt with in a rather reserved fashion," Güntner notes. "What the book does establish is that the couple turned a blind eye to the usual oppression by the SS of the around 600 forced labourers who had been ordered to construct the 'Southeast Wall' (the line of fortifications meant to protect against the advancing Soviet troops - ed). Litchfield now sharpens his tone in The Independent, maintaining that the countess often took willing and sadistic pleasure in witnessing atrocities." Failing that, writes Güntner, Litchfield "would never have made it into The Independent and the FAZ."

Der Tagesspiegel 19.10.2007

For Kai Müller, a direct involvement in the massacre by the Thyssen family has not been established: "The FAZ has gone way out on a limb with this story, which positively crawls with vague 'conspiratorial occurrences.'
There is no doubt at all about the veracity of the massacre. An
Austrian court imposed light sentences on several participants in 1946.
But Litchfield's report fails to specify whether the Margit von
Batthyany and her husband were invited to join as accomplices or
summoned as witnesses. In fact in his essay, the author fails to prove
any direct guilt at all on the part of the Thyssen-Bornemisza family."

In other storiesNeue Zürcher Zeitung 26.10.2007

Believe it or not: homosexual comic strip artistRalf König (see our interview with König, "Cutting off my tongue") has written a comic strip about a heterosexual woman.
The new work is called "Hempel's Sofa," and deals with the complex
love-life of a psychotherapist. In an interview with Peter Durtschi,
König explains
how he got the idea: "I've got real problems with the gay ghetto. Once
people used to say: 'Come out of the closet.' But as the years go by,
it's easy to get the impression that a lot of gays prefer to stay in
the closet and make things comfortable in there. Gay magazines
deal almost exclusively with gay life - all art, culture and reporting
has got gay blinkers. Sure, maybe that's exactly what the younger
generation wants and needs, but I've found it all too empty for years
now."Die Zeit 25.10.2007

Claus Spahn managed to hear a great deal of intellectual music "at the level of doubly reflected self-observation" during the Donaueschinger Musiktage. Yet he also heard something truly new, and that was from the Berlin-based French composerMark Andre. "He knows his way around the border area between noise and tone, and can engage in structurally demanding aural constructions. Anti-eloquence is his compositional style. His approach is carefully tentative and his material is critically examined to the extreme. One hears in his work the feeling of commitment to the complex inheritance of modernity, with every sound containing a rich treasure of experience. Over and above all this reflectivity, his musical creations are immediately penetrating, sensual, andrichly imaginative."

Süddeutsche Zeitung 25.10.2007

If the remembrance of the victims of the RAF is not to become a mere ritual, then it is time to consider a documentation centre, demands Jochen Arntz. He feels that too much attention is devoted to the perpetrators, and too little to the victims. "The task of such a documentation centre would not be to provide an understanding of the culprits and their times Ã¢â¬â there would be no images of the Vietnam War or student protests, and certainly no stylish black and white photos of the young Andreas Baader on exhibition. Instead, visitors would be able to examine the forensic report of the killed policeman Reinhold Brändle. Reading this would make clear how determined these terrorists were to commit murder. After killing Reinhold Brändle with three shots to the head, they continued firing another sixty rounds into his body."

Die Tageszeitung 25.10.2007

Jesse James and the Western have not been reinvented by Andrew Dominik and his film "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," writes Andreas Busche in the culture section. He finds the film interesting, however, when understood as a "reply to the rampant cult of celebrity of our time": "The choice of Brad Pitt in the role of Jesse James is a pure stroke of luck for Dominik's film. His performance fuses star personality and the Western icon into a kind of super VIP. Jesse's fatigue is at once Pitt's Ã¢â¬â his suffering posture reflects his totally smug indifference to the requirements of a glamour-addicted media public for more information. Unapproachable, with dazzling good looks, and weary of our everyday world, he humors his public with grand gestures."

Neue Zürcher Zeitung 25.10.2007

BiochemistGottfried Schatzexplains that we Europeans do not possess the best taste. It turns out that a certain Arthur Fox has discovered that not every person is capable of discerning bitter substances. "Almost every West African, but only about a half of all white North Americans, can identify the powder investigated by Arthur Fox as being bitter. West Africans possess the most genetic diversity of all humans and differ immensely in the variations of their genes. It is most probable that only a small group left the region some 25,000 to 50,000 years ago to settle in Northern Europe, bringing with them only a minuscule fraction of the genetic variation found in West Africa. This is why we Northern Europeans and our descendants must make do with the limited taste repertoire of this small group of African emigrants, and are numb to certain bitter sensations." (See our feature "Children of the sun" by Gottfried Schatz)

Die Welt 25.10.2007

Polish writerOlga Tokarczuk expresses her relief at the outcome of her country's elections in an interview with Paul Flückiger: "The Poles are decidedly pro-European. They perceive themselves as Europeans - as West Europeans I'd say. The elections bear this out. Just look at the long queues that formed in front of consulates in Ireland and Great Britain. Many Poles are trying to make a new life for themselves in these countries, but they still have a sense of responsibility towards their home country. I found that very touching. A new Poland is in the making here - one that no longer defines itself in national terms but as a lingual-cultural community." Tokarczuk also points out that election winner Donald Tusk's party programme is very conservative: "I do, however, think it's very unfortunate that Poland lacks a decent left-wing movement. A new generation of left-wingers has yet to emerge here."

Der Tagesspiegel 24.10.2007

Gerrit Bartels portrays the Dutch novelistA. F. Th. van der Heijden,
author of monumental novels about his country's society. "In his
literary grasp of time, his play with total recall and his attempt to
encompass the entire world in writing, van der Heijden is often
compared to Marcel Proust. In fact, the author even once admitted not only to having read Proust and Joyce, but to having rigorously studied and analyzed
their works. When asked about this, he said, 'They brought the novel so
far along that there's no more turning back. Yet, one must be able to
return from that point. My literature can perhaps be understood as a
constant conflict between modernism and convention.'"

Die Welt 24.10.2007

Felix Müller and Britta Stuff talk with mathematics professorAlbrecht Beutelspacher about the beautiful sides, but also about the tragic aspects of his discipline: "The mathematicianWilliam Shanks
spent his life calculating pi to some 700 digits, at the rate of two
weeks per digit. Unfortunately, he made a mistake at one point, and
from then on everything was wrong. Luckily that only came out after his
death."

Die Tageszeitung, 20.10.2007

Kurt Oesterle has uncovered the background to the difficult father-son relationship of East German dramatistHeiner Müller and his father Kurt. Kurt Müller
was a "liberal, anti-authoritarian" Social Democrat and active opponent
of Hitler, who paid for his convictions in the Sachsenhausen
concentration camp. His imprisonment isolated the family, for which
young Heiner Müller never quite forgave him. In 1951, Kurt Müller
escaped to the West. His son, to the contrary, regarded all the
hardships of the GDR dictatorship as "legitimate. In his autobiography,
he curiously enough justifies this view not with any political, but
rather with a personal reason Ã¢â¬â the dictatorship is directed 'against
those individuals who damaged my childhood.' With his father's
exodus to the West, the son found the opportunity to increase the
distance to his father, in fact, to depict it in absolute terms. The
escape of the father only served to prove the son was right after all.
The emotional 'fissure' that occurred between Heiner Müller and his
father during the Nazi period expanded into a precipice, at least
politically. In the severest settling of accounts, the short story 'The
Father,' written in 1958 yet only published in 1977, the year of his
father's death, is icily laconic in its observations. 'He found
his peace in a small town in Baden, paying the pensions to the
murderers of workers and the widows of the murderers of workers.'"

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÃÂ ÃÂ about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more